BarryKortWebsite: http://moultonlava.b…I am a (now retired) Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the Affective Computing Research Group . My long-term field of research is the Role of Emotions in Learning . Most recently, I have been working on the role of StoryCraft as a traditional method of learning.
I am also a (now retired) volunteer science educator in the Discovery Spaces at the Boston Museum of Science .
My other affiliations have included the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis and the School of Communication and Journalism at Utah State University where I have assisted in the curriculum in Online Journalism .
I was formerly a Visiting Scientist in the Educational Technology Research Group at BBN Systems and Technologies.
Some of my other research interests include puzzlecraft, building online communities, and the functional characteristics of rule-driven systems.
Curriculum Vita:
BSEE With High Distinction, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 1968
MSEE Stanford University, 1969
Ph.D. Systems Theory, Stanford University, 1976
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Network Planning Division of AT&T Bell Labs 1968-1987
Lead Scientist in the Network Center of MITRE, 1987-1990
Visiting Scientist in Educational Technology Research, BBN Systems and Technologies, 1990-1999
Visiting Scientist in the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, 1999-2008
Volunteer Science Educator at Boston Museum of Science, 1987-2013
Retired, 2014-Present

As many of my colleagues and online acquaintances may know, my professional work has largely been grounded in the application of systems theory, to analyze and solve problems calling for a systems approach.

Now that I’m mostly retired, I’ve increasingly begun to reflect on the larger class of problems that plague humankind, above and beyond the more tractable class of problems that a person of my educational background in the STEM disciplines might have been recruited to work on at research venues like Bell Labs, BBN, Stanford, or MIT.

About eight years ago, I began to chronicle my thoughts about the ten biggest and most intractable problems, observing that, from a systems theoretic point of view, all ten of them had a common underlying structure.

Whack-A-MolePunch down any one problem and one or morerelated problems pops up elsewhere.

As I assay it, the ten most intractable plagues of western civilization are conflict, violence, oppression, injustice, corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism.

All ten of these hellish problems have something in common. Like cancer, they tend to reseed themselves, round-robin, from one instance to the next, in a never-ending cycle of recursion.

I would like to see President Obama convene a national problem-solving congress, staffed with the best and the brightest systems thinkers our society has to offer, to systematically address, analyze, and solve the interlinked systemic problems of conflict, violence, oppression, injustice, corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism.

How can those of us who share and promote the systems approach elevate this idea and organize an effective community of forward-looking problem solvers?